As a brand, we always want to attract the eyeballs to maintain our existence and relevance in a consumer’s life. In this digital age, people are browsing through the internet, always looking for engaging content which, in turn, gives the brands a platform wherein they can get noticed by the consumer. One of the ways to do this is the use of display ads. But, lately, the humongous amount of ads all over the internet, and their intrusive nature, have started garnering negative sentiments towards both the ad and the brand featured in the ad.
“When consumers have a frustrating interaction with a brand, that frustration translates into their brand perception as well as their tendency to re-engage with the said brand”
The other way is to create content which is engaging for the user. Hence brands, with “Brand Affinity Lift” as their primary objective, have shifted focus on content marketing. They spend time and efforts to implement a content strategy to create content which is engaging for the user and lets the brand be visible to the said user.
“We need to stop interrunpting what people are interested in & be what people are interested in.” – Craig Davis
Today, people spend a lot of time consuming news which is the most engaging form of content. But brands still mostly use News as a PR mechanism and have not yet explored its full potential as a platform to achieve their objective to be visible (and relevant) to their target consumers. Besides the usual PR stories, a brand can use “News” about their actions and doings, to be consumed by a user as a part of his dose of news, which will in-turn increase the “brand recall” tremendously. This content is not “a generated content in which a brand features discreetly” but rather a full-fledged news article about the brand and its actions. In the old scenario, this “news” would not have been identified and covered. But now, based on the target user base of the brand, content shall (can) be identified and then served to the user at the right time and in the right consumable format.
We’ve done some successful experiments with this type of content and the user engagement was more than that of an average news item. People do want to hear what the brands are doing and impact of their efforts, given that the information is served to them in the format they want to consume, which in this case, is a 60 word short, without any faff, containing only the relevant facts.
Images as example:
The best part is that brands, rather than wasting time and effort to generate “sponsored” content, can now focus on identifying already existing information about themselves and serve it as news to the consumers who are willing to consume it . This way, the scenario where irrelevant and tricky content generates negative sentiments, which is a curse for content marketing, is avoided.
Let’s create the news around your brand that people will love to read.
